gnome-calculator menu unreachable when "global menu" is off

[Walter]

The "Ubuntu's new Enhanced Menu project"[1] aims to add the option of choosing whether you want the "Global menu" or not.

Due to a faulty upgrade, my Ubuntu 13.04 desktop turned out to be missing the indicator-appmenu (and dependencies). And without those, there was no global menu.

That wasn't a problem for me, until I found out that I couldn't put the gnome-calculator back into PROGRAMMING mode because it had no menu to do so [2].

I tried to hack around a bit in the code, but I didn't get very far. See patch attempt in [2].

Kind regards,
Walter Doekes
OSSO B.V.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/682788
[2] http://wjd.nu/notes/2013#gnome-calculator-missing-menu

[Alexis Wilke (alexis-m2osw)]

I have the same problem. I cannot use the global menus because I setup my X environment to focus the window my mouse goes over. That really does not work with global menus since I lose those menus as soon as I move the mouse over another window (although Atl-F10 can help, it's not easy to type that one!)

So... the gnome-calculator is reduced to a totally unusable simplistic calculator! And there are no command line options from what I can see that would allow me to change the settings.

However, as a temporary solution, if we could change the current settings and get a better rendering, it would be great.

[Walter (wdoekes)]

Did you see the workaround on my site? Using dconf-editor to switch the mode?

(And hit the "this bug affects me" to increase its visibility.)

[Michael Catanzaro (mike-catanzaro)]

So these settings are in the "app menu," which gets created in different places depending on the desktop environment. If the desktop environment (Unity) claims to support showing app menus, which Unity does, then Calculator intentionally does not show this menu in its window. In other desktops, Calculator will show this menu itself. Almost all GNOME apps behave the same way: there's nothing wrong with Calculator and there's nothing to fix in the Calculator code. (I guess the problem is that indicator-appmenu is apparently not a hard dependency of Unity, but I'm just guessing: I'm not sure how all these global menu packages work.) Anyway it should be "fixed" in 3.12 because I moved the mode setting from the app menu into the window. It's too important to hide up there. In 3.12 there is a gear menu on the left; in 3.14 the menu will be part of the window title [1].

I took a look at your blog post, and I see that you're editing C code that's output by the Vala compiler. The C code is provided only as a convenience so that you can build Calculator without installing the Vala compiler; it's not intended for editing. You really want to edit the Vala instead. It gets compiled into C when you type 'make'.

[1] http://fedoraftw.com/gnome-calculator-3132-received-interesting-changes

[Walter (wdoekes)]

Thanks for that detailed explanation Michael.

I'm not sure why the other apps didn't pose any problems without the indicator-appmenu. But it's all moot now.

The desktops have been upgraded to 14.04. Let's focus on the problems of the future!

Closing. (If I have the power to do so.)

[David Biesack (david-biesack-sas)]

I found this can be changed via dconf, for those of you (like me) who don't use Gnome or Unity and can't access this hidden menu

$ dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/button-mode "'basic'"; gnome-calculator
$ dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/button-mode "'advanced'"; gnome-calculator
$ dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/button-mode "'programming'"; gnome-calculator
$ dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/button-mode "'financial'"; gnome-calculator